DOCSLIB.ORG

ATINER's Conference Paper Series LIT2018-2462

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
ATINER's Conference Paper Series LIT2018-2462 ATINER CONFERENCE PAPER SERIES No: LNG2014-1176 Athens Institute for Education and Research ATINER ATINER's Conference Paper Series LIT2018-2462 The Imaginary Landscapes of Jim Crace’s Continent Petr Chalupský Associate Professor, Faculty of Education Charles University Czech Republic 1 ATINER CONFERENCE PAPER SERIES No: LIT2018-2462 An Introduction to ATINER's Conference Paper Series Conference papers are research/policy papers written and presented by academics at one of ATINER’s academic events. ATINER’s association started to publish this conference paper series in 2012. All published conference papers go through an initial peer review aiming at disseminating and improving the ideas expressed in each work. Authors welcome comments Dr. Gregory T. Papanikos President Athens Institute for Education and Research This paper should be cited as follows: Chalupský, P. (2018). “The Imaginary Landscapes of Jim Crace’s Continent”, Athens: ATINER'S Conference Paper Series, No: LIT2018-2462. Athens Institute for Education and Research 8 Valaoritou Street, Kolonaki, 10671 Athens, Greece Tel: + 30 210 3634210 Fax: + 30 210 3634209 Email: [email protected] URL: www.atiner.gr URL Conference Papers Series: www.atiner.gr/papers.htm Printed in Athens, Greece by the Athens Institute for Education and Research. All rights reserved. Reproduction is allowed for non-commercial purposes if the source is fully acknowledged. ISSN: 2241-2891 22/06/2018 2 ATINER CONFERENCE PAPER SERIES No: LIT2018-2462 The Imaginary Landscapes of Jim Crace’s Continent Petr Chalupský Associate Professor, Faculty of Education Charles University Czech Republic Abstract In each of his twelve novels, Jim Crace, who likes to refer to himself as a "landscape writer", created a distinct yet recognisable imaginary landscape or cityscape, which led critics to coin the term "Craceland" to denote this idiosyncratic milieu. Through Craceʼs remarkable ability to both authentically and poetically render these milieux, they appear other and familiar at the same time. Moreover, he occupies these places and spaces with communities in transition, which include people who are caught on the verge of a historical shift that necessitates certain social, economic, political and cultural changes that affect all spheres of their private and public lives. Consequently, they shatter essential aspects of their identities. A crucial role in this process is assumed by the locations through which these individuals move or reside, either permanently or temporarily. Crace’s debut novel, Continent (1986), comprises seven thematically linked stories that are variations of a fictitious realm, an imaginary seventh continent whose inhabitants are going through an identitarian crisis which is, symptomatically for Crace, reflected in their spatial experience. The aim of this paper is to provide a geocritical analysis of the novel and explore how it dramatises the intricate interaction between the geographic and topographic properties of landscapes and the protagonists’ psyches. Keywords: Geocriticism, Identity, Jim Crace, Landscape, Place 3 ATINER CONFERENCE PAPER SERIES No: LIT2018-2462 Introduction Jim Crace (b.1946) has been one of the most distinctive personalities on the British literary scene for more than four decades, and his fiction has been popular with both critics and readers. Although he has received a number of prestigious awards in Britain and the United States and has been shortlisted twice for the Man Booker Prize, he is still not as internationally renowned as some of his contemporaries, particularly the other members of the strong post-WWII generation such as Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie, Julian Barnes and Kazuo Ishiguro. Unlike these writers and many others, who in their works from the late 1970s through the 1980s and 1990s became the chief representatives of British literary postmodernism by engaging with its prototypical narrative techniques, Crace has never really espoused such self-conscious playfulness. Instead, he has professed what he calls "traditional" writing in the sense of unrestrained storytelling following the tradition of folktales, myths, legends and parables, which allows him to "lose [him]self in the realms of pure invention" (Begley 2002), yet remain firmly rooted in a conventionally conceived and structured narrative. However, this by no means indicates that Crace is a realist writer; the principle of his writing is an indirect, sometimes almost allegorical, reflection of reality that he achieves through dislocation. As he explains: "What traditional writing does – what I do – is to dislocate the issues of the real world and place them elsewhere" (Begley 2002). It is this fanciful "elsewhere" that has become the hallmark of his writing, and each of his novels is set in a distinct geographic location in a variety of historical periods, ranging from a late Neolithic village to a modern Western city. What may be mistaken for a realistic or naturalistic aspect in his stories is rather an exceptional "preciseness of observed detail" (Tew 2006: xiii), especially from the natural world1. Yet these are not purely matter-of-fact accounts as they always combine these details with a subtle figurativeness and resourceful diction that juxtapose the earthy with the subtle, thus endowing the narrative with meaningful aesthetic and symbolic dimensions. Crace’s style is poetic at times "but also possessing a level of restraint and understatement that lends muscle and nuance to his prose" (Mathews 2012). Therefore, all his novels share the workings of their author’s imaginative power, which sets their universally understandable human stories into "these variously obsessed landscapes and cultures" (Kermode 1998). What connects all their protagonists is that they are exposed to a major change to which they must adapt rather quickly before they are overcome by a new world order. They are part of what Begley (2002) calls "communities in transition." As a result, they find themselves in situations in which the essentials of their identity, both individual and collective, are at stake and need to be transformed or redefined. The fact that these protagonists are undergoing a painful personal and community crisis that forces them to question and/or revise their values and relations within a changing social system makes them accessible to the reader, no matter the concrete geo-historical parameters. The places and spaces in which these stories are set do not only help to develop the plotline, evoke an atmosphere 1Indeed, Crace likes to refer to himself as a keen amateur natural historian (cf. Lawless, bookgroup.info). 4 ATINER CONFERENCE PAPER SERIES No: LIT2018-2462 and enrich the narrative’s sensual aesthetics; they also reflect and at times even determine the characters’ mental and spiritual states. Crace’s fictional milieu is always a unique amalgam of the imaginative, the uncanny, the familiar and the commonplace. What critics have termed "Craceland" is "a world proportioned to reality, and yet largely a system within itself" (Tew 2006: 4), which may appear other and exotic from the outside, but turns out to be recognisable and identifiable inside. In each of his novels, Crace, who likes to refer to himself as a "landscape writer" (Begley 2003), created an alternate landscape whose spatial coordinates are deeply embedded in the text’s narrative and thematic framework. Crace’s debut novel, Continent (1986), assumes a specific position in this regard: it structurally consists of seven stories linked thematically by the challenges facing the protagonists, often involving their own displacement, both territorial and identitarian. Through the mosaic of these stories, Crace composes an imaginary seventh continent2 whose dwellers experience various forms of crisis. Using geocriticism as a theoretical point of departure for its analysis, this paper explores the ways in which Crace links and interconnects the protagonists’ psychic, emotional and spiritual worlds with the geography and topography of territories they inhabit or find themselves in and, consequently, how the seven physical and mental landscapes make up the novel’s unique fictional space-time. After the Spatial Turn Throughout the second half of the 20th century, more and more literary theory and criticism was focused on the representation of space and place, gradually gaining the significance that time and temporality had enjoyed for centuries. This focal shift, insisting that the spatial properties of the narrative should not be restricted to mere background setting, emerged from the acknowledgement that the relationship between human beings and their environment is reciprocal and highly interactive. The fact that human beings live in space-time and both of these dimensions considerably determine our existence and are equally crucial for the formation of our identity opened to theorists a fruitful field of interest that culminated in what can be called the postmodern spatial turn. Its immediate consequence, as Emmanuelle Peraldo notes, is that "time is not the main category of analysis any longer. Space is. It is now considered as a central metaphor and topos in literature, and literary criticism has seized space as a new tool and stake" (2016: 1). As a result, a number of often interdisciplinary critical approaches investigating literary representations of space and place have been developed since the late 1970s. These enhance literary studies with findings from other fields, such as psychology, sociology, cultural anthropology, ecology
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Ecocriticism and Geocriticism: Overlapping Territories in Environmental and Literary Studies
    Book reviews: Ashbridge 271 Robert T. Tally Jr and Christine M. Battista (eds) (2016) Ecocriticism and Geocriticism: Overlapping Territories in Environmental and Literary Studies. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. xii + 214pp., £58 (hardback), ISBN 981137553676. Despite longstanding examination of the environment in literary studies, ‘spatiality’ in its broadest sense continues to be an emergent area of enquiry for scholars of literature. Within the arts and humanities, geographers including David Harvey, Doreen Massey and Edward W. Soja, (all of whom influence essays in Ecocriticism and Geocriticism), have done much to pioneer the intricate relationship between the social and the spatial, an association best summarised in what Soja terms the ‘socio-spatial dialectic’ (Soja 1980: 207). The practice of spatial literary studies concerns not only literary representation of place and environment but pays equal attention to accounts of the psychological experience of space and (dis)placement. While psychogeographers have attempted to bridge the gap between spatial and symbolic experience since the ‘spatial turn’, the collection addresses the timely need for the convergence of critical practices attuned to both environmental and geocritical relations. A recent aspect of the wider discipline of spatial studies has been the focus on postmodern, socially- produced space—including human experience and subjectivity, the poetics of everyday life, and socio- economic manifestations of spatiality— in addition to the notion of a material sense of ‘place’ and ‘placedness’. Robert T. Tally Jr and Chrstine Battista’s collection attempts to overcome this disjuncture between ecocriticism and geocriticism. While geocriticism is principally orientated towards physical ‘space, place and mapping’ (2), owing much to the intellectual pedigree of cultural geographers and situationist thinkers Henri Lefebvre and Michel Foucault, in addition to those mentioned above, ecocriticism’s principal concern is the environment and its effect on human experience.
    [Show full text]
  • Nature&Gender in Alice Munro's “Meneseteung”
    1 ﻣﺠﻠﺔ ﻛﻠﻴﺔ اﻵداب ﺟﺎﻣﻌﺔ ﺑﻮرﺳﻌﻴﺪ ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ Nature&Gender in Alice Munro’s “Meneseteung” and “Before the Change” Submitted by Amany Abdullah Abdel-Aziz Eldiasty Lecturer of English Literature Department of English Language and Literature Faculty of Arts Damietta University DOI: 10.21608/jfpsu.2020.32136.1003 ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ اﻟﻌﺪد اﻟﺴﺎدس ﻋﺸﺮ / ﻳﻮﻟﻴﻮ- 2020م 2 ﻣﺠﻠﺔ ﻛﻠﻴﺔ اﻵداب ﺟﺎﻣﻌﺔ ﺑﻮرﺳﻌﻴﺪ ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ Abstract Within the theoretical framework of ecofeminism, the paper seeks to delineate the vision of the contemporary Canadian short story writer, Alice Munro(1931-), in juxtaposing culture oppressing women, and manexploiting Nature through reading “Meneseteung” and “Before the Change”. The paper investigates the social dimensions oppressing women and the woman/nature bond in the selected works focusing on their affinity and their shared experienceof exploitation and oppression at the hands of men. In “Meneseteung,” Munro uses gender to oppose social trivialities and expected roles while in “Before the Change” she uses gender to oppose apparently
    [Show full text]
  • Literature and Geography
    Literature and Geography Literature and Geography: The Writing of Space throughout History Edited by Emmanuelle Peraldo Literature and Geography: The Writing of Space throughout History Edited by Emmanuelle Peraldo This book first published 2016 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2016 by Emmanuelle Peraldo and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-8548-7 ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-8548-5 TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements ..................................................................................... x Introduction ................................................................................................. 1 The Meeting of Two Practices of Space: Literature and Geography. Emmanuelle Peraldo PART 1: LITERARY CARTOGRAPHY, LITERARY GEOGRAPHY AND GEOCRITICISM Chapter One: Literary Cartography 1 ................................................................................................................. 20 Adventures in Literary Cartography: Explorations, Representations, Projections Robert T. Tally Jr 2 ................................................................................................................
    [Show full text]
  • Circulations Et Renouvellement Des Savoirs En France Et En Allemagne
    Revue d’Allemagne et des pays de langue allemande 51-2 | 2019 Les Humanités environnementales : circulations et renouvellement des savoirs en France et en Allemagne Aurélie Choné, Tim Freytag, Philippe Hamman et Evi Zemanek (dir.) Édition électronique URL : https://journals.openedition.org/allemagne/1877 DOI : 10.4000/allemagne.1877 ISSN : 2605-7913 Éditeur Société d'études allemandes Édition imprimée Date de publication : 10 décembre 2019 ISSN : 0035-0974 Référence électronique Aurélie Choné, Tim Freytag, Philippe Hamman et Evi Zemanek (dir.), Revue d’Allemagne et des pays de langue allemande, 51-2 | 2019, « Les Humanités environnementales : circulations et renouvellement des savoirs en France et en Allemagne » [En ligne], mis en ligne le 10 décembre 2020, consulté le 18 mai 2021. URL : https://journals.openedition.org/allemagne/1877 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/ allemagne.1877 Revue d’Allemagne et des pays de langue allemande revue tome51 numéro 2 d’Allemagne juillet-décembre 2019 et des pays de langue allemande Dossier Les Humanités environnementales : circulations et renouvellement des savoirs en France et en Allemagne AURÉLIE CHONÉ, TIM FREYTAG, STEFAN HECHT PHILIPPE HAMMAN & EVI ZEMANEK Zur Konstruktion „humanimaler“ Emotio- Environmental Humanities: Wissenstransfer nen in Otto Alschers Die Bärin. Natur- und und Wissenserneuerung in Frankreich und Tiergeschichten aus Siebenbürgen ...................... 371 Deutschland – Einleitung ................................................... 275 GUILLAUME CHRISTEN GABRIELE DÜRBECK De la gestion à la naturalité : le lynx vient- Der Mensch als Gärtner oder Parasit il déplacer les savoirs de la nature ? der Erde: Narrative des Anthropozän in Le cas du retour du lynx dans la Réserve deutschsprachigen Qualitätszeitungen de biosphère transfrontalière Vosges du (2010-2016) ..................................................................................... 285 Nord-Pfälzerwald .......................................................................
    [Show full text]
  • View/Download Entire Issue Here
    ISSN 1904-6022 www.otherness.dk/journal Otherness and the Urban Volume 7 · Number 1 · March 2019 Welcoming the interdisciplinary study of otherness and alterity, Otherness: Essays and Studies is an open-access, full-text, and peer-reviewed e-journal under the auspices of the Centre for Studies in Otherness. The journal publishes new scholarship primarily within the humanities and social sciences. ISSUE EDITOR Dr. Maria Beville Coordinator, Centre for Studies in Otherness GENERAL EDITOR Dr. Matthias Stephan Aarhus University, Denmark ASSOCIATE EDITORS Dr. Maria Beville Coordinator, Centre for Studies in Otherness Susan Yi Sencindiver, PhD Aarhus University, Denmark © 2019 Otherness: Essays and Studies ISSN 1904-6022 Further information: www.otherness.dk/journal/ Otherness: Essays and Studies is an open-access, non-profit journal. All work associated with the journal by its editors, editorial assistants, editorial board, and referees is voluntary and without salary. The journal does not require any author fees nor payment for its publications. Volume 7 · Number 1 · March 2019 CONTENTS Introduction 1 Maria Beville 1 ‘Some people have a ghost town, we have a ghost city’: 9 Gothic, the Other, and the American Nightmare in Lauren Beukes’s Broken Monsters Carys Crossen 2 Sanctuary City: 27 Pynchon’s Subjunctive New York in Bleeding Edge Inger H. Dalsgaard 3 Anthony Bourdain’s Cosmopolitan Table: 47 Mapping the ethni(C)ity through street food and television Shelby E. Ward 4 Eyeing Fear and Anxiety: 71 Postcolonial Modernity and Cultural Identity
    [Show full text]
  • Lenka Filipova Freie Universität Berlin, Germany [email protected] T
    Author: Filipova, Lenka Title: T. Tally Jr. and Christine M. Battista (Eds.), Ecocriticism and Geocriticism: Overlapping Territories in Environemental and Spatial Literary Studies Lenka Filipova Freie Universität Berlin, Germany [email protected] T. Tally Jr. and Christine M. Battista (Eds.), Ecocriticism and Geocriticism: Overlapping Territories in Environmental and Spatial Literary Studies (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 214 pp. While the idea of place has been one of the central analytical categories in ecocriticism since its emergence as an academic discipline in the 1990s, it has rarely been conceptualised with respect to existing theories of social production of both place and space. Ecocriticism is commonly concerned with immediate, local relations of place and the environment, but much less with broader spatiotemporal relations of particular places—a seeming paradox given that in the era of globalisation, place is generally understood as constituted by networks of relations and forms of power stretching beyond specific places and occurring within space-time. The collection of scholarly essays entitled Ecocriticism and Geocriticism and edited by Robert T. Tally Jr. and Christine M. Battista is designed to bridge this theoretical gap between place studies and theories of social production of space and place by bringing together a range of essays dealing with questions of space, place, mapping, and the environment. In the introduction, the editors note that “[w]hile distinctive in meaningful ways, both ecocriticism and geocriticism
    [Show full text]
  • “To Draw a Map Is to Tell a Story”: Interview with Dr
    KATIUSCIA DARICI // “TO DRAW A MAP IS TO TELL A STORY” // “TO DRAW A MAP IS TO TELL A STORY”: INTERVIEW WITH DR. ROBERT T. TALLY JR. ON GEOCRITICISM1// ---------------------------------------------- SUBMISSION DATE: 01/05/2015 // ACCEPTANCE DATE: 15/05/2015 // PUBLICATION DATE: 15/06/2015 (pp 27-36) KATIUSCIA DARICI UNIVERSITÀ DI VERONA UNIVERSITAT POMPEU FABRA [email protected] /// KEYWORDS: spatiality, geocriticism, literary cartography, literary geography, mapping, map making¸ mental maps. This interview with Dr. Robert T. Tally Jr. (associate professor of English at Texas State University) aims to highlight the strong interrelation between literature and space from the starting point of Geocriticism. With this term, which was coined to define a new discipline able to interact with “literary studies, geography, urbanism and architecture” (Tally 2011: xiv), in fact, Tally offers a theoretical basis for spatiality in relation to literature. Dr. Robert T. Tally Jr. is the author of six books: Fredric Jameson: The Project of Dialectical Criticism (2014); Poe and the Subversion of American Literature: Satire, Fantasy, Critique (2014); Spatiality (The New Critical Idiom) (2013); Utopia in the Age of Globalization: Space, Representation, and the World System (2013); Kurt Vonnegut and the American Novel: A Postmodern Iconography (2011); and Melville, Mapping and Globalization: Literary Cartography in the American Baroque (2009). Currently, Tally is working on a study of the spatial imagination in modern world literature. The translator of Bertrand Westphal’s Geocriticism, Tally is also the editor of four collections of essays: Geocritical Explorations: Space, Place, and Mapping in Literary and Cultural Studies (2011); Kurt Vonnegut: Critical Insights (2012); Literary Cartographies: Spatiality, Representation, and Narrative (2014); and The Geocritical Legacies of Edward W.
    [Show full text]
  • Geospatial Memory
    Special Issue: Geospatial Memory Geospatial Memory Media Theory 2.1 (2018) Edited by Joshua Synenko Introduction Geospatial Memory: An Introduction Joshua Synenko .................................................................................................................. 1 Spatial Turns, Locations and Locative Media Anthropocene Elegy and GeoSpatial Presence Jon Dovey and Duncan Speakman .................................................................................. 32 BATTERCTRAX: Observations of Sensory Dissonance, ‘Doubling’ and other Residual Effects of Locative Media Matthew Flintham .......................................................................................................... 57 Between Landscape and the Screen: Locative Media, Transitive Reading, and Environmental Storytelling Jill Didur and Lai Tze-Fan ............................................................................................ 79 Looking for ‘in-between’ Places Manuel Portela, Albert Acedo, and Carlos Granell-Canut ............................................ 108 Topologies of Memory Invisible and Instantaneous: Geographies of Media Infrastructure from Pneumatic Tubes to Fiber Optics Jason Farman .............................................................................................................. 134 Modes of Address and Ontologies of Disconnection – Towards a Media Archaeology of Mobile Networks Florian Sprenger ........................................................................................................... 155 Tracing
    [Show full text]
  • A Dark Ecology of Performance: Mapping the Field of Romantic Literary Celebrity Through Gothic Drama
    A Dark Ecology of Performance: Mapping the Field of Romantic Literary Celebrity through Gothic Drama Brian R. Gutiérrez A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Washington 2017 Reading Committee: Marshall Brown, Chair Juliet Shields Raimonda Modiano Program Authorized to Offer Degree Department of English 2 ©Copyright 2017 Brian R. Gutiérrez 3 University of Washington Abstract A Dark Ecology of Performance: Mapping the Field of Romantic Literary Celebrity through Gothic Drama Brian Robert Gutiérrez Chair of the Supervisory Committee: Professor Emeritus Marshall Brown Comparative Literature Gothic drama reached a height of popularity in the 1790s, partly due to celebrity actors like Sarah Siddons. Yet we know very little about the relationship between the many writers of gothic dramas and the celebrity apparatus. Although critics such as Richard Schickel regard literary celebrity as strictly a twentieth century phenomenon, recently other scholars have been arguing for a broader historical view. Richard Salmon, for instance, has cited photography, investigative journalism, and the phenomenon of authors being interviewed at their homes as evidence of the machinery of celebrity culture operating in the 19th century; David Higgins and Frank Donoghue have argued for the importance of periodical writing in the 18th and 19th centuries, and Claire Brock and Judith Pascoe have pointed out the feminization of fame and public theatricality in the Romantic period. And Tom Mole, in addition to examining the career of Lord Byron in the context of celebrity culture, has recently edited a collection of essays on the material and discursive elements of celebrity culture from 1750 to 1850 to provide a “synoptic picture of celebrity.” 4 Yet the most popular and profitable literary genre of the Romantic era has remained a stepchild of criticism, the victim of a disjuncture between literary critical study of dramatic texts and historical study of performance culture.
    [Show full text]
  • Upgrading Ekphrasis: Representations of Digital Space and Virtual Worlds in Contemporary Literature
    Upgrading Ekphrasis: Representations of Digital Space and Virtual Worlds in Contemporary Literature Nina Shiel Submitted for the award of PhD Dublin City University School of Applied Language and Intercultural Studies Supervisor: Dr Brigitte Le Juez January 2015 I hereby certify that this material, which I now submit for assessment on the programme of study leading to the award of PhD is entirely my own work, and that I have exercised reasonable care to ensure that the work is original, and does not to the best of my knowledge breach any law of copyright, and has not been taken from the work of others save and to the extent that such work has been cited and acknowledged within the text of my work. Signed: _________________________ ID No:_______________ Date:_______________ Acknowledgements This thesis was engendered during a lecture by Dr Brigitte Le Juez in the second year of my part-time MA in Comparative Literature. As my supervisor, Brigitte has been everything I could have wished for and more: always supportive, always encouraging, always providing all kinds of opportunities, and yet never letting me get away with work that is in any way below my standard. A mere merci beaucoup seems insufficient for what has been a life- changing experience, but it is the only thing I have. The School of Applied Language and Intercultural studies have been very supportive during my degree and provided me with teaching opportunities – many thanks indeed. My project was funded for its three years by the Irish Research Council. I am immensely thankful for their generosity.
    [Show full text]
  • The Afropolitan Flâneur: Literary Representations of the City and Contemporary Urban Identities in Selected African and Transnational Texts
    The Afropolitan Flâneur: Literary Representations of the City and Contemporary Urban Identities in Selected African and Transnational Texts A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy of Rhodes University by Carol Leff March 2019 Supervisor: Prof Sam Naidu Abstract When an individual walks the urban landscape there is a unique symbiosis between self and city. It is through walking the cityscape and observing the crowd and the surrounding environment that the archetypal literary figure of the European flâneur acts as a mirror of a particular time and space. But how might such a flâneur walk and observe the city in contemporary African and transnational literary texts? I argue that there is a literary re- imagining and repurposing of the flâneur figure which has hitherto not been acknowledged and explored: an Afropolitan flâneur. ‘Afropolitan’ is a term popularised by Taiye Selasi in a 2005 essay to refer to a ‘scattered tribe’ of ‘Africans of the world’ (n. pag.). In this dissertation, the entanglement of the Afropolitan subject and the European flâneur brings together past and present, Africa and the West. I first provide a historical and theoretical framework to illustrate how the flâneur figure ‘migrated’ from Europe to Africa, and how this figure is to be understood as a literary construct, in relation to current considerations of Afropolitanism. I go on to discuss a wide range of texts that engage with Afropolitan flâneurs who traverse cities in Africa (such as Johannesburg, Cape Town and Lagos), or global north cities (New York, Paris and London).
    [Show full text]
  • THE CAPITAL of ELSEWHERE: PLACES, FICTIONS, HOUSTONS a Dissertation by CLIFFORD WALLACE HUDDER Submitted to the Office of Gradua
    THE CAPITAL OF ELSEWHERE: PLACES, FICTIONS, HOUSTONS A Dissertation by CLIFFORD WALLACE HUDDER Submitted to the Office of Graduate and Professional Studies of Texas A&M University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Chair of Committee, David McWhirter Committee Members, Juan Alonzo Emily Johansen Jonathan Smith Head of Department, Maura Ives May 2018 Major Subject: English Copyright 2018 Clifford Wallace Hudder ABSTRACT This study examines the manner in which fictional works illuminate the complex identity of place by investigating authors associated with a single American city, Houston, Texas, focusing chapter length studies on four: Donald Barthelme, Rick Bass, Farnoosh Moshiri, and Tony Diaz. Its methodological framework is the “geocritical” approach, wherein, as stated by Bertrand Westphal, “[t]he study of the viewpoint of an author or of a series of authors . will be superseded in favor of examining a multiplicity of heterogeneous points of view, which all converge in a given place, the primum mobile of the analysis.” This multifocal approach reveals Houston as a place of unusual juxtapositions formed by freeway culture, fluidity of categories due to a lack of zoning regulations, a “timelessness” resulting from constant bulldozing of the past, and a powerful concern for market forces owing to a laissez-faire attitude towards business and regulation, brought together in what architect Peter Rowe labels the city’s “ever-present and unvarnished capacity for destabilization and shape-shifting.” Variations of the place-experience of Houston based on the four authors’ heterogeneous viewpoints are examined, and potential drawbacks of the geocritical model in identifying the nature of place through the lens of literature are explored.
    [Show full text]